A thought about backing up

I believe that's about the norm. How many of us hobbyists manage that is another matter I guess. My Vortexbox is backed up to a USB Hard Drive in the same cabinet. Bring on the cloud !!

I had data duplicated between two disks on the same NAS. While this protected me from a disk going bad, it didn't help me when the NAS fell off the shelf.

I've now got music on my computer that I sync with the NAS. Atleast got data on two floors now.

Im the same as Mango, except i make a copy of my PC drive and store it in the garage. You can never have too many backups

I have my music on a 4 disc NAS with file duplication which is not bad ( as with RAID if the disk that has the operating software on it goes pete tong it is unlikely you will be able to recover).

Separately I have two backups to USB HDD's which I alternate. One sits in the garage.

I have about 2 TB of music so I don't want to have to re-rip it.

Hi Dunstan,

I agree with your colleague. My QNAP NAS is also running in RAID with 2 harddisks but you never can be sure. What I did was to buy an additional LaCie external Harddisk with a network connection. It is in the network now and has a "schedule-function" which you can edit. Every week it make an extra full copy of the NAS during the night. The LaCie's are not so expensive, and for me it just gives that safe feeling.

Iver

Minimum backup is between two devices that are entirely separated. RAID is most certainly not backup in any sense. If the controller goes bad everything is lost, and a replacement controller might not see the previous data.

Much better to have at least one onsite backup plus one offsite backup.

I have a QNAP NAS and I take a copy of my Multimedia folder to an external USB drive which I Keep in the Garage. I plan to start taking it over to one of my daughters house about 3 miles away and do this once a month depending on how much music I buy. It shouldn't be a pain because I am over there often enough to see the grand kid, baby sit, help with DIY etc.

Online backup, it's the only way that makes sense.

Maybe not. I don't like it for the simple reason that I'm relinquishing control and trust of it to some other entity. What happens if they lose it. What happens if they expose it due to inadequate security. What happens if they corrupt it without your knowledge. There are a lot of things that can go wrong that are out of your control. It should not be your primary backup strategy, IMHO.

I agree Race Tripper. I run an online business and over seven years the database has had to be restored due to server problems at the hosting company. They manage to get it back to a certain point but it's a good job that I also take a backup and can put it all back to a more appropriate position! I have learned to have multiple backups and be in control of you own destiny over the many years I have spent in the IT industry.

In short online backup is ok but I would also take my own backup. 

Our whole lives are dependent on online storage, some people must be in a constant state of anxiety.

I do not put all my eggs in the online basket. If something is important to me, I do not leave it to chance online.

No not constant anxiety, it's more like reality. If you can be in charge of your own destiny, then be in charge. Nothing wrong with online backup but experienced IT professionals don't have all their eggs in one basket.

I like the idea of restoring from one of my backups then ripping a max of 10 CD's. I don't want to rip 3000 CD's again.

I also have cloned copies of my MacMini and MacBook Pro that I can restore at any point as well as being able to get any individual file from a time machine backup.

Currently I have my ripped cd on my ns01 with  one internal backup, and external backup on a readynas. I plan to buy a usb disk for backup of the readynas, both the ripped cds and my highres files.

I have almost finished backing my highres files up to audiosafe. Last time I tried last year I never managed to have my smaller music collection uploaded to Audiosafe, but it seems to work less slower now. Maybe I will try to backup my rips to Audiosafe also, but I suspect it will take weeks maybe months. My downloaded music is also on the usb stick I used before I bought the nas, and on a usb hard disk, tbut that disk is too small to hold both my downloads and the ripped cds.

I doubt I will get around to have an off site backup plan.

Claus

It does not matter how you achieve a backup plan as long as you have one. That is multiple copies on multiple, separate drives and if possible in more than one location. It must work for you and your life arrangements.

I also keep all my CD's stored away in a nice cool, dry and dark place. I've never got rid of any music that I've purchased including vinyl. In fact the music in digital form is safer than the vinyl.

...until you work how long it takes to copy your data up to "the cloud".

Phil

Took about 50 days to back up about 500GB - so my upload speed to CrashPlan's cloud was averaging 10GB/day. I'm on a non-optical (copper) line (and I'm at the end of it) so not the fastest internet connection. Once you've 'seeded' your backup it doesn't take long to back up newly added data (if I rip, say, 10 new CDs then it'll take less than half a day before the backup is at 100% once more).

If you are US-based then for a fee you can post a drive with your data on it to CrashPlan and seed it that way (avoiding the initial upload). If you can't do that (I couldn't) and you have many TB of data then cloud backup won't be practical unless your upload speeds are significantly better than mine (which isn't hard...) Luckily you can trial CrashPlan for 30d for free so you can determine whether it works for you without making a commitment. I did this and only bit the bullet once I had satisfied myself that it was going to work for me.

Cheers

Ian

So in the case of catastrophic failure, you can do a full restore and have yourself up and running again in less than two months. 

A backup plan without a working catastrophic recovery plan, is not a backup plan.

I Couldn't agree more Race Tripper. A disc drive taken somewhere safe can have you up and running in hours.

Online backup means that you also need to have an internet connection. This would not have worked when there was a lightening strike in one of my neighbours garden 4 houses away that took out set top boxes, TV's, phone lines (both copper and fibre providers, routers and a network switch. Luckily I had shut down all my Naim kit and disconnected my NAS from the network and mains.

The phone companies spent about 4 weeks in the area repairing everything.

You seem to be failing to appreciate that download speeds are many times faster than upload (my download speed is 10 times my upload speed) so yes, if I lose my PC AND BOTH RAID drives in the server AND the backup then I can download all of my data in five days. I hope that this never happens but five days waiting until I get all of my data back will be the least of my worries if an event that takes out all of these drives occurs!

Leaving aside the opportunity for sarcasm relating to the upload and download speed I have to say that I do agree that at the current time then cloud storage is far from suitable as a disaster recovery mechanism and I'm not sure that I would want to wholesale hand over my private data to an external cloud storage provider.

Anyway, I typically add a couple of BluRays, half a dozen movies and a handful of CDs to my media server every week which is about 120Gb ... uploading this to an online service just won't happen with current upload speeds. Cloud storage has a purpose but not as an all-encompassing backup.

I split my data into two camps ... "Vital" and "Bl**dy Annoying If Lost".

The "Vital" stuff sits on a 2Tb NetGear ReadyNAS Duo (with a second mirror drive) so the data is duplicated. 75 miles away in Guildford my best friend has a similar 2Tb NAS (with a mirrored drive) and we have a reciprocal agreement where we share the 2Tb of storage and the NASs are sync'd every 24 hours across a VPN. This gives data stored in two locations on four drives.

The "Bl**dy Annoying If Lost" stuff sits on a 27Tb Windows Home Server running DriveBender (which provides drive pooling and ensures that all files are stored on two separate drives in case one drive goes down) and once a week a "backup" NAS (actually a Windows XP machine again running DriveBender for drive pooling only in this case) spins up, runs a batchfile which does an XCOPY incremental backup of the various media folders and then shuts down again. This gives data stored on four drives.

Cheers

Phil

Agreed.  Best to have your own backup too but if you are storing it remotely then the data may be stale (if you're depending on a person making the backup and taking it offsite).

I'm not suggesting using a cloud based solution instead of a backup that's under your control but for $140 for four years it's a no brainer to me to have as my final failover (besides multiple copies in a number of locations under my own control).

My point is, don't trust online backup. If it is secondary or tertiary to restoring from failure, then OK. But for anyone who relies on that as a primary strategy, be prepared for disappointment when that fails. There are many things that can go wrong that are out of your control.

Take Apple for example. I will not trust them for a split moment with my data. I'm a big fan of their hardware and OS products, but they don't have a good record handling network and data services. With their iCloud they will get a lot of people to believe their data is safe if they save it to iCloud storage. That is a very flawed approach. How long before iCloud becomes another MobileMe, where they decide to shut you down without giving you an alternative for your data? I am suspicious of Apple's, "too bad, so sad" attitude towards services they retire. I don't trust other cloud storage companies much more.

The cloud may be a good strategy for readily accessing data (assuming good security) from multiple devices, but it is a bad idea for backup, IMHO.

I keep two backups at home, and a rotating backup locked in my drawer at work. Nothing is stored on servers controlled by others.